1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical information system utilizing a portable storage unit represented by an IC card as a health care, medical care, or welfare card.
2. Description of the Related Art
Examples of utilizing a card type storage medium for a medical information system will be described below.
[1] An example of introducing an IC card to the field of health care, medical care, and welfare is an experimental project involving several local municipalities. In this example, a name, an address, a health insurance card number, a blood type, a history of side effects of medicines the person has suffered, allergies, information of medications, and information of examinations, and others are stored in the IC card and utilized for health care consultation, vaccination, mass screening, and so on. Similar attempts have been made by several other municipalities. In the case of a certain municipality, the results of examinations and physical checkups, data of administered medicines, and information of a name and blood type were stored in the IC card, and used for diagnosis at a medical institution unconnected online or used in case of an unexpected accident. In this example, the role of the IC card is supplemental. A health care center, hospitals, and clinics are interconnected on an online network in order to share data of examinations and physical checkups. In another municipality, basic information such as a name and address of an individual as well as data of physical checkups, body conditions, and use frequencies of welfare facilities are stored in the IC card. Another example is an experiment on an IC card system having the capability of a health insurance card.
[2] As an example of utilizing an optical card, a system for recording the contents of a pocket book for the mother and baby, displaying graphically and successively the weight of a pregnant woman, an amount of uric protein, the length of the funds of the uterus, the lateral diameter of the fetal head, and the development curve concerning the fetal femur, all of which assist in readily grasping the conditions of the pregnant woman and the growth of the fetus, have been developed. In the case of this system, when the weight of a pregnant woman increases too much or trouble in a fetal growth pattern is detected, a color on a screen changes to attract attention.
From the viewpoint of a picture archiving and communication system (PACS), techniques described below are used to transmit medical images.
[3] PACS is a comprehensive medical-image management system to be implemented in a hospital for storing, retrieving, transmitting, and displaying medical images. An object of PACS is to improve the efficiency and quality of medical cares by electronically storing medical images. For transmitting medical images, a standard protocol for transmitting a medical image, Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM), has been widely used. Moreover, there is a method of recording medical images on an offline medium (magneto-optical disk) according to a format defined for electronically storing medical images, Image Save and Carry (IS&C), and of thus making it possible to carry the medical images. It is a teleradiology system that results from expansion of the application range of PACS for realizing local or remote medical care. According to the teleradiology system, public switched lines or the integrated services digital network (ISDN) is used to transmit information of medical images and to ask a specialist to send back the results of diagnosis. Thus, urgent diagnosis can be made properly and a treatment can be provided quickly.
Typical techniques for mutually utilizing medical data among hospitals will be described below.
[4] A plurality of specified hospitals are interconnected over telephone lines to form a system for managing medical information of all patients and information as to medical images in a centralized manner. Within the system, medical information of a patient can be referenced at any hospital.
[5] Medical information and information of medical images are stored in the form of a database at each hospital. The structured query language (SQL) is used to reference a database at another hospital. However, some databases may contain a few grammatical errors, or the relatively strict relationship between a client and server may bind referencing. Moreover, restrictions may be imposed on mere exchange of files other than database referencing in terms of diverse file formats or different operating systems (OSs).
By the way, the techniques described below are available from the viewpoint of an electronic clinical recording system.
[6] In an electronic clinical recording system under development in a certain university, electronic clinical recordings are expressed using E language such as the standard generalized markup language (SGML) or hyper text markup language (HTML), and managed as a medical database in a centralized manner. The organization of the World Wide Web (WWW) is used to realize retrieval and display. In this example, the electronic clinical recordings are regarded as structured statements, and the structures and broad units of meaning are indicated with tags.
An existing medical information system requests to satisfy the precondition that clinical recordings be managed in a centralized manner within each hospital. Medical information is cross-referenced under the precondition. This method has the following problems.
&lt;1&gt; A protocol adopted for information transmission is used on an inflexible standardized basis. It is hard to add an another entry item to a clinical recording.
&lt;2&gt; It is time-consuming to search for necessary information from enormous information. Since the work of retrieval must be carried out by all means, it may interfere with consultations.
&lt;3&gt; Using even an existing large-capacity magnetic disk drive or magneto-optical disk drive (automatic changer), it is impossible to store medical information of all patients and information of medical images thereof on a permanent basis. All data items are not always accessible.
&lt;4&gt; All medical institutions do not have similar hardware environments. Preparing equipment necessary for enabling any other medical institution to reference clinical recordings is too costly and hardly feasible.
&lt;5&gt; For improving the quality of medical care, it is more important that examination-related images, information of physical checkups, and biomedical information can be referenced in relation to a clinical recording than that examination-related images alone can be referenced. However, PACS does not provide a framework for an idea of handling medical information as multimedia data.
&lt;6&gt; The storage capacity of a card type storage medium is relatively small and the application range thereof is limited. Moreover, the precondition that clinical recordings should exist in each hospital must be satisfied.
As mentioned above, according to the known method, it is hard to materialize a wide-area hospital information system using a network such as the Internet as a medium.